Guest column: Trail promises economic development

Where trains once hauled produce for the tables of Henry Flagler’s St. Augustine hotels, today a track-replacing trail promises better times for descendants of long-isolated and under-served communities.

A crowd earlier in May gathered to designate that trail through little Armstrong as an integral part of the East Coast Greenway, a national trail almost 30 percent paved and safely off-road between Key West and Calais, Maine on the Canadian border.

Although such trails have already induced turnaround for Florida cities like Dunedin along the Pinellas Trail and Winter Garden along the West Orange Trail, Armstrong is different because it’s rural by heritage.

Its people descend from Gullah Geechee communities as far north as Wilmington, N.C. They settled in Armstrong more than 100 years ago. Although many at first were migrant workers, they made Armstrong their home. Their church, houses and recreational field display permanence.

Armstrong will prove to be a landmark trail site. That was clear from those who traveled there for the trail occasion. Among those were Florida Parks Director Donald Forgione, East Coast Greenway Alliance Vice-Chairman Paul Haydt, Florida District 24 Representative Travis Hutson, St. Johns County Commissioner Cyndi Stevenson, Putnam County Commissioner Karl Flagg, Palatka Mayor Vernon Myers, Benjamin Coney of the St. Johns County Department of Housing and Community Development, various Florida bicycling and trail leaders and people from Armstrong and nearby. A five-man team from St. Augustine’s Freedom Road Productions filmed the event.

That team represents a strategy worked out among the nonprofit SEA Community (Spuds, Elkton, Armstrong), Ben Coney’s office, a Jacksonville leader in the four-state Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Anthony C. Hill and the 15-state Greenway Alliance.

Although the Cultural Heritage Corridor doesn’t yet encompass the 19.4 miles between St. Augustine and Palatka (more than half paved or otherwise funded), Gullah Geechee descendants populate the corridor and the coast up to Wilmington. The corridor throughout is contiguous with the East Coast Greenway.

The idea is to use the trail through Armstrong for economic development of local character and to make Armstrong a model section for the entire corridor-greenway overlap.

So far, SEA leader Malinda Peeples has talked of a grocery story, a full-time staffed health clinic, an Armstrong historical museum, a restaurant and café for use by trail riders and bed-and-breakfast rooms chiefly for Armstrong members on return visits from having relocated elsewhere. Plans depend on generating grants and expenditures by trail users. The trail through Armstrong is in fact three overlapping trails that will appeal to different users.

It’s the Palatka-St. Augustine Trail good for day users. That trail is also part of a 260-mile St. Johns River-to-sea loop that continues south from East Palatka through Volusia, north Brevard, Volusia again, Flagler and St. Johns counties back through St. Augustine to Armstrong. This five-county trail is ideal for tours of up to a week that already attract cyclists to its route and will attract more as soon as SunRail commuter trains from Orlando in 2014 reach DeBary in southwest Volusia. Trains will carry bikes free. The trail is more than half in place, funded or in planning.

At the macro level, cyclists already travel the East Coast Greenway between Fernandina Beach and Key West and others between Maine and Florida. Wheels are turning for rural development through southwest St. Johns.

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Herb Hiller is Southeast Region Coordinator for the East Coast Greenway. He writes frequently about trails and locally resourceful tourism.